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Towns In Mind: Urban Plans, Political Culture, And Empire In The Colonial Chesapeake, 1607--1722, Paul Philip Musselwhite

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation charts the contested political and cultural meaning of urbanization in the emerging plantation societies of Virginia and Maryland. Scholars have long asserted that Chesapeake planters' desire for lucre led them to patent huge tracts of land, disperse across the landscape, and completely dismiss urban development. However, through 17 pieces of legislation, colonists, governors, and London administrators actually encouraged towns in the Chesapeake through the seventeenth century. Despite the environmental and agricultural constraints of tidewater tobacco, both colonies wrestled with a perceived need for towns, which consistently appeared to represent the best means to engineer the region's political economy …